The way of experience is to hold firmly to the knowledge that the end is in the beginning, and that each stage contributes its own share to the final perfection of the job as we want it to be. Taking it so, we can enjoy each stage for its own sake and resist the urge to scamp, which is also fatal. At first it will need a great deal of self-restraint. We do not take kindly in these days to anything requiring that kind of patience. Very few men are brought into contact with work that has old craft traditions, and it is by seeing an old craftsman in action and the infinite care he takes over every detail that is most readily acquired. But because woodwork is a very ancient craft and the use of creative skill is part of man’s inheritance, the right kind of approach will in the end come naturally enough to the man who sets out determined to acquire it. This does, in actual skill and artistry, take him a good many stages ahead of the sculptor, for instance, of today, who is capable of twisting a few strips of metal and labelling them “Man” or “Woman” or whatever name he fancies. The woodworker knows perfectly well it is no good trying such a trick and labelling it “chair” and being forced to meet his problems honestly with as much skill and artistry as he can command, he develops both.
The craftsman’s world does indeed carry within itself all the elements of wider living. In the everyday world we have the same need to be sure of our beginnings; the same need of standards which must be adhered to if we are going to a maturity that knows both freedom and wisdom and a sense of direction. A man is only truly free when, like the good craftsman, he adheres staunchly to the good he knows and builds the good life upon it. The house that has no secure foundation will soon totter and fall, but although we say stoutly enough that only a fool would think otherwise, how often do we fail to apply the practical wisdom which our tools teach us to the management of our own lives. For the rules that appear to limit and bind stand as guides along the highway, safeguarding us from the waste and misuse of the material of our lives — our gifts and talents, our health and strength, and relationships with others. And the true freedom which is the freedom to use our powers to their best and fullest extent, comes from observing them.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, March 1955 issue (photo courtesy of Jeff Burks)
The modern craftsman is in a far happier state than the modern painter or sculptor, so much of whose work seems to have lost touch with reality. Not for the craftsman the strange, erratic impulses which would bid him present a chair looking like some queer mastodon from the past. He is tied inexorably to facts. The chair he makes must have stability and a measure of comfort because it is made for someone to sit on, and a person who discovered he was expected to sit on some kind of revolving hippopotamus might turn into a very severe critic indeed. So the chair must be made with precision and care, conforming to certain rules which will act as a brake on his imagination – and even a craftsman’s imagination can have its wilder moments – and will keep him, willy nilly, tethered to the world of common sense and reality. And it is good for us to be so tethered. It is the world for which and in which we are working, whose needs we share and to whose ideas of graciousness and beauty we have it in our power to make some contribution. But only if we are willing to work within the framework it imposes.
It is in this way we attain full freedom to do our best creative work. If we make a table, for instance, giving insufficient care to exact measurements and the accurate fitting of the joints, the results will be a rickety article which will inevitably lessen our chances of making a good finished job of it. For who can put his whole heart into the artistic finish of a thing which is constantly lurching under his hand, and will, moreover, perversely defy all attempts at last-minute remedies. It may even be difficult to find the fault, so small may have been the inaccuracies which, added together, have resulted in a piece of furniture in which its maker can feel no pride and which will be a constant source of irritation to everyone who tries to use it. And so he learns to be sure of his beginnings; that he has first to be accurate and careful, combining knowledge and skill to produce a sound piece of work suited to its purpose before adding the finer, decorative touches which will give shape and reality to his imaginings.
It is here, of course, that the amateur so often fails. He is in such a hurry to reach the “nice” work at the end, when the piece will be assembled and only awaits finishing, that he goes through the preliminary stages at best grudgingly, and it is in these stages that his troubles begin.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, March 1955 issue (photos courtesy of Jeff Burks)
Charles H. Hayward was one of the greats. As editor of The Woodworker magazine he was the standard-bearer for handwork in the 20th century. We have spent eight years scanning and editing his work to present two volumes of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years.” We think you will enjoy these books even more if you learn a little about Hayward’s life. Part I of this series is here.
Many of the old houses in Shoreditch were in an appalling state of disrepair, for although built originally as humble dwelling houses in long terraces, their use as workshops had resulted in shocking deterioration. Woodwork was innocent of paint, locks were frequently broken and replaced by padlocks and staples, an inner doors were invariably missing altogether. Stair treads were reduced to paper thickness, and no one saw the necessity for handrails – indeed they would have been in the way when timber or furniture had to be taken up or down. I have since wondered how they ever escaped being burnt down, for quite frequently, when a man had a veneering job to do he would light a shaving blaze to heat his cauls almost beneath the staircase.
In the shops around the district you could buy anything needed in furniture making. Veneers were available in consecutive leaves both knife – and saw – cut, in mahogany, walnut, oak, and many of the decorative hardwoods. There were also bundles of off-cuts, and sheets of marquetry in both 18th century patterns and (then) modern designs; ready-made turnings and legs of all kinds were commonplace. There were dozens of stores where metal fittings of all kinds were available; and there were polish houses where every kind of french polish and stains could be obtained; scotch glue (usually in cakes to be broken up); and of course there were tool shops where Norris planes were almost commonplace, and believe it or not, you could still buy a wooden hand-brace with brass strengthening pieces let flush into the wood.
My own very early workshop life in the pre 1914 days was in a workshop near Victoria. We reckoned ourselves as “West End” and were inclined to speak in a superior way when talking about Shoreditch, though in fact some very fine cabinet work was turned out in some of its workshops. Nearly all of our work was antique either reproduction or “fake”, and I use that latter term in a general sense, since it is often difficult to decide when a thing is an outright form of forgery or has been altered in some way, possibly to save it from further deterioration. We did a mixed class of work. The more skilled craftsmen were engaged on first class cabinets – shaped front sideboards, pieces with elaborate barred doors, and in addition was a whole range of good quality but relatively simple items.
Memory is a curious thing. Even when it is retentive it can play curious tricks, not only with past events but in the way we come to regard bygone happenings. Sometimes something which at the time was distressful or painful can in retrospect be wrapped around with a sort of protective padding which softens the picture it conjures up. Not that all the past was really one-sided, but that it is only natural to recall the better aspects of things and forget that almost everything has its less perfect side.
Perhaps the chief difference between the attitude of life then and that of today was that things then seemed to be in a settled state forever. We thought and acted as though the next few decades would see us in the same workshop, and quite likely at the same bench. There might be a few minor events such as a man changing his job, or possibly being sacked (redundancy was unknown in those days), but such things were trivialities and did not affect our general way of life.
Not that we didn’t argue about things in general, often in a heated way. Politics and religion, I recall, were the chief subjects, and opinions, frequently backed with maledictory or profane references, were hurled across the workshop from one end to the other. But such observations were frequently so much hot air, and were accepted as a sort of buffer against the tedium of things in general.
So life went on in sort of a jog-trot way to the accompaniment of the inevitable workshop noises of hammering, sawing, and planing with the occasional whine of the machine planer in the shop below, until the bell was rung for breakfast or tea break when a sort of uncanny silence descended on the workshop, argument and chatter being suspended by a sort of unspoken agreement in the immediate business of making and drinking tea and eating sandwiches. These intervals in general workshop life were largely a necessity in those days for we worked quite long hours. In summer time the working day started at 7am, with a break of half an hour for breakfast at 8 o’clock, then on till 1pm when the shop closed for an hour. The day finished at 6pm. It was varied in winter by a start at 8 am, finishing at 7 pm but with the breakfast break replaced by a tea interval.
Some of the men came from quite a distance such as Surbiton, and must have left at 5:30 to catch the 6 o’clock train. Even so there was a walk of about a quarter of an hour at the end of the journey. I still recall the scene outside the workshop door in the early morning. I myself arrived on a bike, but nearly all the men either walked or came by tram, and stood about in doorways or leaned against railings, awaiting the arrival of the foreman to unlock the door. Five minutes later the door was locked again and any unlucky late arrival had to kick his heels in the knowledge that an hour’s pay would be deducted from his pay packet at the end of the week. Indeed I have heard some choice, imperfectly smothered epithets uttered by an unhappy latecomer as he arrived panting only to find the door locked.
Editor’s note: In 1981, Charles H. Hayward wrote some short autobiographical pieces about his time as a young woodworker in England before the Great War. To give you a better picture of the man behind our new book, “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years,” we offer some excerpts for you to enjoy.
Looking back over the years perhaps the most outstanding difference between a cabinet-making workshop as I remember it in the years before the war of 1914 and that of today is that, whereas in the early days a man made a piece of furniture from start to finish, today he may carry out just one process in a whole chain of operations. It is, of course, the result, partly of mechanisation and of specialisation. There are a few workshops in which a man may make up perhaps one of an individual piece for a customer, but in general the furniture of today is not only mass-produced but is the product of several specialised operations, one shop cutting parts to size, a second laying veneers, a third cleaning up, another assembling, and so on. To a man of today the day’s work may be one long repetitive process, and he may never see the final outcome.
In the early years of which I speak, there were of course some machines in use, circular saws, bandsaws, planers, spindle moulders, and so on, but mass-production on a grand scale had yet to come, and it was still possible for an individual cabinet-maker to make a living, turning out one or perhaps two or three of an item.
I recall that remarkable district of Shoreditch as it was before 1914 when it was the home of the furniture trade. There were a few factories in which a dozen or so men might be employed in turning out bureaux, tables, or whatever their specialty might be, but for the greater part whole streets of houses were let out, sometimes in individual rooms to cabinet-makers, each self-employed. One man might be making the finest grade cabinet work, serpentine-front sideboards, or oval writing desks, etc., while his neighbour was turning out the cheapest grade flimsy items made from plywood faced with veneer. No one thought there was anything strange about such curiously mixed classes of work, and each man went about his business sublimely indifferent to the works of his neighbours.
Of course, even in those days the necessity for machines to reduce costs had made itself felt, but few men had the room or facilities for installing even a basic machine, and so came the development of machine shops which undertook to do planing, fret-cutting, sawing, spindle moulding, turning, and so on. Thus a cabinet-maker could take his timber or partly prepared parts and have the moulded, rebated, or given whatever treatment was needed.
And even here the curious system often maintained in which, say, a woodturner would hire the use of a lathe for a day or more, and would then earn whatever he could on a piece work basis from regular or chance customers. His clients would bring him their timbers with a drawing or note of whatever was wanted, and bargain for a price.
I recall as a youngster wanting a set of oak turned legs for a table I was making. One of the men from the workshop where I was an apprentice offered to take me to Shoreditch when he had finished work on Saturday at 12:30 pm. He knew the district well, having worked there himself, and we went by tram to Old Street (there were still a few horse-drawn trams in those days, though they were mostly electric). The machine shop was in a dismal back street, and apparently had been the basement of a large house, for we went four or five steps down from the pavement. The turner must have been a master of his craft (as he needed to be because he was far from sober and was in the garrulous stage of drink). He leaned against the stand of his lathe for support as he finished off the legs and entertained us with a recital of his matrimonial difficulties. I have never seen a man work so quickly with gouge and chisel and still turn out a really clean job. When we paid him he made an elaborate bow, gave us his blessing, and picked up the next square of timber for turning, apparently set for an afternoon’s work. Maybe he found it more congenial to remain at work than face further contact with his life companion.
I cannot recall that there seemed to be anything odd about either the district or the people who worked there. Things in those days seemed to produce a species with curiously emphasized characteristics, and working conditions and sanitary arrangements were tolerated to a degree difficult to realise today. I remember being taken to the East End of London a day or two after the Sydney Street Siege to see the site of the street battle, and opposite the blackened building were two women, both drunk, fighting like furies, one with her blouse torn open up the front and both with black eyes and scratched cheeks. Eventually one fell into the gutter, and the last I saw of her was as she was carted off screaming, strapped into a wheeled hand-stretcher by two policemen, one of whom had his helmet knocked off. (These wheeled hand-stretchers, by the way, were used as much for removal of drunks as for use in street accidents).
Here’s a short list of stuff you should see before June – the five-year anniversary of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
We have figured out a way for international customers to buy a book plus a pdf at a discounted price. We’ll have details in the next few weeks.
Starting in February, we are going to begin selling original handmade copperplate prints of the 12 projects in “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Each month we will feature one of the project prints for ordering on the website. Then the artist, Briony Morrow-Cribbs, will make your copperplate print to order and they will be signed and numbered by Briony and myself. Each print will be $125; we’ll offer a different print every month. We’ll also be offering a complete set of the prints in a handmade box. Details to follow.
Visitors to the new Lost Art Press storefront will be able to examine and purchase these copperplate prints during our March 12 open house. Prepare to be impressed.
For the five-year anniversary of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” we’ll be printing special stickers, red T-shirts and a 17” x 22” poster featuring an architectural drawing of the chest. All of these will be available first at our Covington storefront as we work out the supply issues, and then on the website.
“Woodworking in Estonia” is at the top of my editing list right now. We hope to have that at the printer by June.
All of this is possible because I’m not teaching this year. I’ll also be releasing three DVDs through Popular Woodworking that I think you’ll find interesting. Oh, and I’ve started working on my next book. It will be unlike anything published in the last 70 years. Promise.
